America
has fallen into a spiritual funk that is rooted in denial of free
speech. It has fallen under the spell of a regime of mandatory thought
called “political correctness”. Whites, regardless of
their actual conduct, are judged guilty of institutional racism while
racially hateful or aggressive conduct by blacks - what might be
called “black racism” - has been defined out of existence.
The national discourse has stooped to a level of intellectual dishonesty
that would have shocked the founding fathers.

Held
in the grip of blatant double standards, white people have become
demoralized. They
are afraid to say what they think on racial subjects. Blacks then
accuse
them of cowardice and dishonesty. The age of Orwellian double speak has
come with a vengeance. The thumb-screw liberals who control the media
and higher
education allow not a dissenting word to be heard.

Free-thinking
individuals continue to exist in our society. The problem is is that
political
opinion in the community’s opinion-expressing institutions
- the news media, education, and religion - has ceased to be diverse.
Consequently, a tide of similar thought pours over the society.
There is no platform
that features free discussion. There is no forum that tolerates
a genuine clash
of ideas. The name of the game is to capture the platform and impose
a uniform set of views.

In
our nation’s newsrooms, like-minded
individuals maintain an orthodoxy of social and political thinking
if insider testimony can be believed. Michael
Janeway, former chief editor of the Boston Globe, described how “the
politics of the street came into the newsroom ... Suddenly newsrooms
had de facto caucuses organized by gender, race, and ethnicity. Suddenly
coverage
of controversial stories had to be negotiated within the newsroom as
well as without.” Michael Barone, a columnist with U.S. News & Report,
once told an audience in Minneapolis that “feminist thought police
patrol every news room” in America.

The
mainstream media have been traditionally liberal. Conservative thought
has found a way around
that barrier in talk radio. So we have
discussion
taking place on two different tracks. Each medium catering to a particular
audience. No wonder political opinion has become so polarized in
this country. Liberals (or progressives) talk only to liberals, and
conservatives
only
to other conservatives. There is no moderating influence that comes
from an exchange of differing views. Once the platform has been captured,
the parameters are set for what can be said.

It’s
worth noting that the struggle within the news media to control the
message takes
place behind the scenes. The reader has no idea who wrote
the editorial or or edited the story giving it a particular slant.
Institutional secrecy protects the person or persons responsible
for deciding how a story
is pitched. This violates the deepest traditions of our nation.
We like to think that the processes of democratic decision making
are
transparent. We
cherish the freedoms enunciated in the Bill of Rights, including
freedom of speech and religion. Any system of compulsory moral
thought is, in effect,
a religion. That includes political correctness in its various
forms.

We
are now a people subjected to rigid and persistent ideological intimidation.
How could things have come to this? I do not think
that the regime
of political correctness could have arisen without the prior
experience of communism.
Now, I am not saying that today’s proponents of political
correctness are communists. Communism is an economic program,
and these people are concerned
with identity. They are two different sets of issues. Still,
the ideologically charged environment in which race relations
are discussed
needed an historical
antecedent to wean Americans from their tradition of fair and
honest discussion. It’s not that media bosses are espousing
communism, in other words, but that a political line trumps the
pursuit of
truth. That’s what
communism contributed to our politics today.

the
Hollywood communists

American
communism had its greatest influence in the film industry. The story
is told in a book by Ronald and Allis Radosh titled “Red Star
over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s long Romance with the Left.” (See
summary of this book.) Hollywood
is also where Ronald Reagan, the future President, became
such a fierce anti-communist. So the story of communists
in Hollywood, though brief and insignificant, has broader
implications.

This
story began when the sons of two top studio executives, Maurice
Rapf and Budd Schulberg, accepted
invitations to
visit the Soviet Union from a communist-front organization,
the National Student League, in the summer of 1934. They
soon became communists and established cells in southern
California. It became chic to belong to the party.

The
party’s initial goal was to inject communist
themes into film entertainment. The studio bosses were
concerned about this both because a serious political
message ruins films and because, being Jewish, they feared that
a connection between Bolshevism and Jews might be made
in the public mind. They were willing to employ communist
screenwriters but, with the exception of films such
as “Mission
to Moscow” made during World War II, kept the
political message under control.

As
the Cold War began and the American communist party
began attacking the Truman administration, communist
influence in Hollywood came under scrutiny of the
House Un-American
Activities Committee. A much-publicized hearing was
held in October, 1947, in which Communists employed
in the
film industry were subpoenaed. Party leaders made
light of the
proceedings. Fearing a backlash, the studio heads
then agreed to fire and not to rehire all known communists
working for the studios. That was the start of the “Hollywood
blacklist.”

In
1951, the House Un-American Activities Committee held another hearing.
This time, it required
subpoenaed
witnesses
to reveal other communists whom they knew in the
course of their work. They were required to “rat
on their friends”. Some witnesses complied
with the committee’s
request; others did not. This moral dilemma set
the stage for the myth of the “Hollywood
Ten”.
The party members who refused to turn in their
friends became heroes.

The
Communist Party was never the same after those
hearings. It tried to gain relevance to contemporary
politics by
supporting the black political struggle. The
fight against racism became a new theme of party doctrine.
Members
now had to be careful not to use racially offensive
terms. A former editor of the Daily Worker newspaper
observed
that the charge of “white chauvinism” became
a “weapon” that allowed party members “to
settle scores, to climb organizational ladders,
to fight for jobs and to express personality
conflicts.”

Today,
except for the myth of the blacklisted screenwriters, the history
of
Hollywood communism
is mostly forgotten.
Yet, this history goes a long way toward explaining
how we got to the present situation. Communism
may be dead
but its spirit lives on in the willingness
to subordinate truth to political power.

truth
gives way to the party line

At
one time, one would imagine, intellectually curious Americans debated
issues of the day. They were willing to be convinced by superior
arguments. That’s how we want to believe a free society operates.
The communist experience changed that. Instead of acknowledging truth,
communists adhered to the party line. If they said something out
of line, they might be disciplined by party officials such as the
cultural commissar, V.J. Jerome. The party’s “truths” shifted
from one position to another in response to changing political circumstances.
Communists supported one policy when Stalin signed a nonaggression
pact with Hitler, and another after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.
Implausible arguments were offered to support the current line.

Political
correctness is like a party line. One cannot have an open-minded
discussion of race. Instead, people are locked into certain positions.
There
is, actually, only one permissible position - the “anti-racist” one.
Someone who disagrees with that position is a “racist” - a term
which carries with it the historical baggage of enslavement, lynchings, and
segregated public facilities. Only whites can be racist according to the
prevailing theory; blacks, being victims, are incapable of that sin. If people
say something racially offensive, they must grovel before their critics,
recant, and say, “I am not a racist”. Public discourse has come
to this. It reminds one of how the Communist bosses treated political deviants.

media
cadres

Another
point of similarity between Hollywood communism and today’s
regime of political correctness is that the struggle of ideas does
not take place through open debate but through messages emanating
from institutions. In the 1930s, the film industry was such an institution.
Millions of Americans watched movies expecting to be entertained.
The communists had the idea of infiltrating this industry so they
could slip a political message into the films. By repetition, the
public would cumulatively absorb and accept a certain line of thinking.

Today,
journalism is on the front lines of political persuasion. There
are respected newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post,
Los Angeles
Times, and Wall Street Journal. There are mass-circulation magazines such
as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, and the three main
television networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. Liberals have the edge in some
media; conservatives
in others. There are also cable-television networks catering to various
points of view.

So
is everything now balanced and fair? Hardly. Today’s
public discourse does not feature individuals persuadable to other points
of view but spokespersons
for particular views. Which view will be expressed depends on the forum.
In each forum, political partisans push their message through sympathetic
editors and reporters. The Hollywood communists would have understood the
situation well.

persuasion
by building the brand

Lenin
recognized the power of the visual media, motion pictures being their
first fruit. When television came along, advertisers learned to sell
products by presenting attractive lifestyle images that were repeated
often and in a variety of ways. This was how consumers were “persuaded” to
buy something. The object was to establish a strong brand name. One
knew what to expect in a product later to be seen on a store shelf.

The
same technique applies to political persuasion. Here types of people
are shown in negative or positive roles with the idea of establishing moral
stereotypes. White people who identify with their race have become associated
with the stereotype of the Ku Klux Klan member in frightening garb or the
southern white sheriff who bullies black people. Through repetition of
stories, the white “racist” becomes associated with lynching
defenseless blacks. The “anti-Semite” likewise becomes
associated with Hitler and the slaughter of Jews in concentration
camps. These images and themes
are repeated until the intended connections are made. That is how the visual
media persuade. They create a brand.

Advertising
gurus say that a sale is made after seven different impressions.
Therefore, the marketers
of products advertise often and in a variety of media.
At some point, the mind lowers its intellectual defenses. The more times
a person sees the same message, the more deeply it will sink in.

In
politics, persuasion takes the form of a vast, repetitious effort
to create horrifying images in history and attach them to certain types
of people. With
respect to anti-Semitism, the definitive image is the Nazi concentration
camp with gaunt inmates and piles of stacked bones. Racism consists
of white slave-masters
whipping black slaves, white lynch mobs, the Ku Klux Klan parading in front
of a burning cross, and Bull Connor sicking German-shepherd dogs on peaceful
Civil
Rights protestors. To build those images, we have high-school history classes,
newspaper or magazine features, television dramas, feature-length films,
museum exhibits, and holidays honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Black
History Month,
and Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Once
political brand is established, an association with it can be used
to cast other subjects in a certain
light. For example, the “Nazi” brand
has been linked to the philosophy of eugenics (the idea that the human
species can be improved through selective breeding of persons with
desirable traits).
The German Nazis believed in eugenics and put their beliefs into practice
in gruesome ways. Although many other persons besides Nazis also
believed in this
approach, the public is persuaded that eugenics programs are inherently
Nazi and should be rejected for that reason.

Not
too long ago, there was an exhibit at a science museum that made
the connection
between eugenics and the Nazis. There have
been college courses,
or courses
that history high-school teachers are required to take as part of their
continuing-education requirement, that have done the same. If a “science
museum” exhibit
makes the connection between Nazism and eugenics, then that connection
must, of course, be “scientific”. Likewise, what the teacher
says would be “true” in a practical sense if students wish
to pass the course. We can see that someone wishing to oppose the program
of eugenics need not win
the argument in an open debate. He need only smear it through association
with Nazis and then persuade someone to put on a course or stage a
museum exhibit
that expresses this point of view. He need only “capture” a
forum.

Besides
persuasion through television and films, there is the kind that appeals
to the intellect. Education deals in reasoned arguments.
But
let’s not
get our hopes up too high. Most college courses in the humanities are
believed to be slanted toward a liberal point of view. From a political
perspective, the
critical factor is which faculty members get hired and who receives
tenure. Department heads tend to promote persons with views similar
to their own.

dismiss
your opponents' views

Jacques
Barzun once published a book in which he complained of the type of
education found in today’s universities. The gist of his argument,
according to a reviewer, was that “American universities are
more disordered than ever. Many students who wished to destroy the
university are now tenured. They are middle-aged but their radicalism
is juvenile. Opposed though they were to the narrow, bureaucratic
specialized university, they have become even more specialized than
those they criticized. Their university means nothing to them ...
Their departments mean nothing to them except as safe havens for
others of the same viewpoints and the same narrowness. Only administrators
are left to care about the whole university, but they are busy raising
funds.”

This
relates particularly to attitudes about race. Today’s
tenured professors are often persons who grew up in the Civil Rights
era. They cherish its memory
and may even have played a part in the movement themselves. It is not surprising,
then, that today’s college curricula are full of courses in black
studies, women’s studies, Holocaust studies, and the like. The “right” answer
to questions raised in such courses would be what the professor thinks
is right. In fact, it’s even worse. The preferred method of winning
arguments in some academic settings is to silence the other person rather
than discuss.

The
columnist, George Will, traces this tactic to Columbia University
historian Richard Hofstadter. “The tactic,” he wrote, “is
to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.” Dismiss
means not to respond. The other person’s position is presumably
so ridiculous that one would not care to dignify it with a response.
And if
you hold the megaphone,
as editors do in newspapers or professors do in the classroom, that strategy
prevails: Ignore dissenting views. Rely on your institutional prestige to
suggest that you are the authority and your critics are ill-informed.
The megaphone
is in your hands, after all.

This
has set the stage for today’s
politics of demonization. The first line of defense is to ignore your
adversary. React to his opposing views with
silence. If that does not work, the second line is to demonize him. Call
him a “racist” or an “anti-Semite”. Use emotionally
loaded words like “rant” or “spew vile slurs” -
these are actual words or phrases used in a recent Star Tribune opinion
article - to describe
his argument. Ask him to apologize for his remarks. Ask him to resign his
position; and, if he will not, try to get him fired. Demand all this
in the name of human
decency. Sound familiar?

It
should sound familiar because the Hollywood communists employed those
tactics. Although venomous ad hominem attacks
have been employed throughout
our political
history, they were taken to a new level in the confrontation between
communists and their opponents in the 1940s. The Hollywood party
leader, John Howard
Lawson, referred to “a parade of stool-pigeons, neurotics, publicity-seeking
clowns, Gestapo agents,” in testimony before the House Un-American
Activities Committee. Persons who disagreed with the communist program
were routinely accused of “red-baiting.” Now,
of course, the word “communist” has itself been used in a
similar way by anti-communists. Name calling, used to cinch the argument,
has often
been a substitute for reason.

There
is another similarity between the situation today and that sixty-five
years ago. After Hitler invaded Russia
in 1941, American communists switched
from attacking
President Roosevelt to a message of patriotism. Since the United States
and Soviet Union were allies in the fight against Hitler, their common
interest
was to win
the war. The communist line was that the party’s agenda was also
the nation’s.
After the war was won and Harry Truman became president, the Cold War
began. The American communists now argued that the new President was
adopting policies
of “nascent fascism” while they had remained true to the
principles of Roosevelt. By implication, President Truman was betraying
the U.S. national
interest. They, the communist party, were Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
political heirs. The American people did not buy that idea.

The
parallel I now see to that situation is the idea that the “white racist” -
someone who hates or despises black people - and the “anti-Semite” -
specifically an enemy of Jews - is or should be a universal pariah.
All Americans should embrace the black people’s fight against
white racism and the Jewish struggle against anti-Semitism. What’s
good for me is good for everyone, in other words. If you’re a
Bulgarian, on the other hand, you’re
on your own. You fight your own fights and don’t expect others
to help you.

the
power to record history and keep it alive

It
is important to realize that history is what the writers of history
choose to make of it rather than a complete record of what actually
happened. Journalists have control over the initial presentation.
They can decide, first, how to write a particular story, giving it
a moral focus. They can then choose where to place it in the newspaper
and decide how much space to give. They can repeat a story by mentioning
it in another story, or by running an editorial about it, or by having
columnists mention it. A story repeated often enough can be made
to seem a significant part of the historical record.

One
story that has been repeated quite frequently was the killing of
three Civil
Rights workers - Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman
- near Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964. Their story was told,
for instance, in the 1988 film, “Mississippi Burning”. Another
such event was the agonizing death of a black man in Texas, James Byrd,
who was dragged for three miles by a pickup truck on June 7, 1998. Three
white
men committed that murder. The Texas legislature enacted the James Byrd,
Jr. Hate Crimes Act in May 2001 in response to the heinous crime. Both
sets of killings had a racial aspect. Both received prominent coverage
in newspapers.

However,
tens of thousands of murders have taken place in the United States
over the years. Many have involved perpetrators and victims of different
races. Between October 2nd and October 22nd, 2002, for instance, two
black
men, Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad, went on a shooting spree
in the Washington, D.C. area in which ten persons were killed and
two others
were wounded. Muhammad’s plan, according to court testimony, was
to kill six white people a day for 30 days, then kill police officers,
and finally
extort a large sum of money from the U.S. government before fleeing to
Canada.

Admittedly,
this story received much publicity at the time, especially when the
killers were still unidentified and on the loose, but it seems
lately
to have been forgotten. No films have been made about it, and no legislation
was passed. Perhaps newspaper editors, film producers, and politicians
are not interested in stories of black-on-white violence, but only
in those which
support their own stereotype. If a motion picture is made, one cannot
even be sure that Malvo and Muhammad will not be portrayed as heroes
rather
than mass murderers.

So
we have a politics in which white people are perceived as being prone
to committing violent acts against blacks
and black people are
perceived
to be victims because of the way that news events are reported. In
fact, crime statistics show that blacks commit proportionately many
more violent
crimes than whites. Admittedly, most black killings involve other
blacks. But is it any less tragic for people to be killed in ways
that do not
interest the news reporters?

The
experience of communists in Hollywood is relevant here because of
their intimate relationship with the
media. The party members
and their
friends
were members of a profession that was able to shape history. As
intellectuals employed in film and television media, they could control
the image
of events. Therefore, when people today mention the “blacklisted
Hollywood writers”,
it is generally with sympathy. The inquiries of the House Un-American
Activities Committee have produced heroines like Lillian Hellman,
who refused to inform
on her colleagues, and villains like Elia Kazan who succumbed to
the pressure. The Hollywood Ten are seen today as talented artists
who were persecuted
for their political beliefs by a public that understood little
of justice or art.

The
story was more complicated than that. In fact, the Communist
Party bungled its performance in the 1947 hearings. Party members
might individually
have
said, “Yes, I’m a communist”, and been done
with it. Instead, the party insisted that its membership be kept
secret.
It treated the HUAC
hearings as a farce. That arrogant stance forced the studio chiefs
to make their fateful decision to fire known communists and thereafter
to blacklist
them. The United States was then in a cold war with the Soviet
Union. Those chiefs were not stupid.

The
1951 hearings were a different matter. The new element then was that
witnesses would
be required to name others whom they
knew to
be communists.
Because the studios were now refusing to employ communists,
that meant that the named persons would lose their jobs in Hollywood
or never
find one there.
The decision therefore became personal. A witness who refused
to answer the questions might be jailed for contempt of Congress;
or, if he did
answer, he would harm a personal friend and then be reviled
as
a snitch and a traitor
by the liberal-left community.

Today communism is an embarrassment to the types of people
who might once have been attracted to its philosophy. It is
not often
discussed.
We are
left only with the impression that the blacklisted artists
might have been victims of McCarthyism. In hindsight, however,
the
Hollywood communists
who professed innocence were not misunderstood liberals but
persons who did conspire
to help Stalin. There were, in fact, Soviet spies in America.
To be honest, few, if any, of the Hollywood communists engaged
in
espionage or used
force
against the U.S. government. Party members were mainly a group
of dilettantes,
stooges of Stalin, who vainly hoped he would put them in power.

a
subliminal influence on the present

Looking
back on that era, one is struck by how strange those people’s
concerns seem to us today. They took their ideas seriously. We do
not. I think that’s because America has passed into the age
of television where we expect to be entertained. We’ve given
up on projects to save the world. The ideological disputes that raged
in the ‘30s and ‘40s seem remote. Franklin D. Roosevelt,
a towering figure in his time, now seems an alien figure. Concerns
about organized labor have faded.

I
have the impression that America’s
recent historical consciousness begins with the Truman administration.
If American history is told through
the medium of television, then President Kennedy is a key figure. We remember
his vibrant personality and, of course, his assassination. Also, in the
infancy of this medium, the Civil Rights movement began to blossom.
So the iconic
images of our history are televised scenes of racial protest in the south
and the triumphal oratory of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Beneath
all that, however, lies the structure of discourse that frames issues
of gender
and race. It’s like the dim memories of childhood when our
personalities were set in a certain way. That’s why the history
of communism still matters. Events from that era set a tone for subsequent
discussions of race. They established the mechanisms by which the discussion
would take
place. There would be a more selective kind of journalism. Only certain
parts of the story would be told. The decision-making process would be
kept secret.
Secrecy was a communist trademark whose practice has continued to this
day. The use of front organizations to misrepresent the identity of communists
and mask their activity is related to this.

After
blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo quit the Communist Party
in the spring of 1956, he wrote a memo questioning the wisdom of keeping
memberships
secret in a society that allowed political parties to compete openly
for support. This party was, he wrote, “the only organization
I know of that has, for over three decades, maintained the general
secrecy
of its membership
regardless of external political circumstances and apparently on a
permanent basis.” The party’s policy of secret members
had been a disaster. Either the Hollywood members, wrote Trumbo, “should
have been open Communists, or they should not have been members at
all.”

I
would suggest that media secrecy today has also been a disaster.
We need greater transparency in the process of selecting
stories. Whose
agendas
are being served in the selection of “news” that the
public is allowed to see? If there is bias in the reporting of gender
or race
relations, who
is behind it? Let the editors and reporters identify themselves.
Do their personal opinions influence their journalistic decisions?

As
Tom Hayden explained it in his C-SPAN interview, the Civil Rights
movement was essentially a “Christian religious movement
with heavy Jewish input from the north.” Rev. Martin Luther
King and his colleagues were southern Christian clergy with ties
to clergy
in the north. The northern clergy at
that time were wrestling with issues of religious tolerance. Barriers
were breaking down between Christian denominations. Jews were meanwhile
entering
elite colleges in greater numbers. They held top positions in the
media, labor unions, and business. Jews tended to sympathize with
blacks because
Hitler’s white-supremacist views created a natural affinity.
They, too, had been victims of social discrimination.

Meanwhile,
in the affluent society of the ‘50s and ‘60s, college
attendance was soaring. Student idealism was on the rise. The unions
were struggling for economic and social justice. The religious
righteous were looking for action.
All those forces tended to work to the disadvantage of the relatively
poor southern states with their aristocratic pretensions and
their clinging to lost glory.
Anti-racist crusaders from the north descended upon them with a fury
not seen since Reconstruction days.

The
white southerners had their own story. That story goes back to the
Civil War era when
a less well-equipped, numerically inferior
Confederate
army,
led by a gallant general, fought the Northern army to a standstill
for
several years before being defeated. It goes back to the Reconstruction
era when
the
defeated
South was humiliated by vindictive Northern politicians and carpet-bagging
profiteers, uneducated blacks were put in positions of authority
over whites, and unscrupulous
politicians looted state treasuries. Some semblance of decency
and order was restored when southern whites regained control. That
was
the story
told in
films like “Birth of a Nation”.

fight
racism to remain competitive with global communism

The
communist element again enters the picture. It is known that the
FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, had Martin Luther King under surveillance
because the bureau believed that Dr. King was associating with known
communists. The FBI would legitimately have been concerned if Civil
Rights leaders were linked to persons plotting violently to overthrow
the U.S. Government or if they were spying for or otherwise conspiring
with communist governments. It was the time of the Cold War. Stalin,
however, was dead. The Korean war had come to an end. By the time
that Martin Luther King achieved prominence, the subversive threat
of communism had largely subsided. The fear had not.

Even
so, the U.S. government was still engaged in an ideological struggle
against
international communism. Newly formed nations in Africa and Asia
were led by persons of color. A continuing accusation leveled against the
United States was that it was treating its black citizens poorly. And now
blacks in the south were rising up against segregationist rule. People
around the world were following that development.

In
1953, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public
schools. When,
in 1957, a group of black students wanted to enter Little Rock
High School against the wishes of the white population, President
Eisenhower
had to make a decision. He decided to send federal troops to the south
to enforce
desegregation. Eisenhower, a father figure, enjoyed great moral authority
among all Americans. His decision made all the difference in tipping
the balance toward support of black Civil Rights.

One
of the reasons motivating Eisenhower was a need to deal with arguments
that communists
and their Third World allies were making against the
United States that this country oppressed and discriminated against
its black
citizens. The President wanted to remove that ideological weapon used
against America
in the Cold War. Foreign-policy requirements thus overrode a long-standing
reluctance to interfere with social arrangements in the southern states.

speech
becomes stigmatized

The
communists bequeathed another legacy. The party focused its attention
less on what people did than what they thought. Unlike the Bolsheviks,
the American communists did not attempt insurrections against the
state. Members were instead held to upholding “correct” opinions
laid down by the party leaders. This set a precedent for subsequent
times.

To
its great credit, the U.S. government never outlawed the Communist
Party. It has always been legal to belong to organizations
that advance ideas. The
government did, however, punish communists who were engaged in espionage.
The difference between thought and action is critical. At the first HUAC
hearing, Ronald Reagan testified that he preferred opposing communist “lies” not
by making belief in them illegal but by refuting them with superior evidence.
That position was consistent with the American tradition of free speech.

Today,
in contrast, political pressures have been directed toward making certain
kinds of thoughts illegal. We have the concept of a “hate crime”.
A criminally violent act can be punished more severely if accompanied
by hateful expressions directed against a particular group. Recently,
the
government of Argentina expelled a Catholic priest because he denied
the Holocaust.
In contrast to such practices, most thought has remained legal in the
United States even though the news media has done its best to persuade
the public
that certain kinds of thoughts are vile and no self-respecting person
could possibly have them.

In
any event, our community “values” today
seem more concerned with policing political thought - in particular,
finding expressions of bigotry
- than with policing violent behavior. Our public discourse takes on
a moralistic tone echoing what the nanny-like newspaper editors think
is good for people
to believe. With such messages repeated over time, community opinion
tends to follow their line of thought.

Deep
in the psyche of a free society is the idea that that crime and punishment
are reserved for
actions that palpably hurt other people.
Emotionally hurtful
or uncomfortable speech should not not a crime. “Sticks and stones
may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is a ditty
I learned as a boy. In the past several decades, however, that principle
has come under
attack. While Americans are not thrown into prison for what they believe,
they can certainly lose their jobs or be subject to other kinds of
pressures if the wrong opinions are expressed.

the
protected class

The
politics of gender and race has also led to the concept of a “protected
class”. Departing from the principle of “equal justice
under the law”, the law protects certain types of persons on
the basis of their birth-determined characteristics more than it
protects others. When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld race-based preferences
for admission to the University of Michigan in 2003, Justice Sandra
Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, admitted that such
preferences “offend” the Constitution; but for reasons
of social and political expedience they were allowed. As a concession
to legality, Justice O’Connor supposed that a time limit might
be set on the preferences - perhaps twenty-five years.

I
trace this idea of morally preferred groups back to the communist
theme of class
struggle. Workers and farmers, who worked with their hands, were
said to be struggling to overcome domination by bankers and businessmen.
Marxist history featured a struggle for power between those two morally
differentiated groups. In like manner, we have black people and other
minorities struggling
for power against white people and the types of society that favor them.
We have women struggling against patriarchal structures. We have various
other innocent people seeking justice in an evil society dominated by that
residual population associated with white males.

This
political scheme is inspired by a dualistic history in which the
forces of good battle the forces
of evil and in the end are successful. It is
always one group of people (blacks, women) who are good; and another
group (whites,
men) who are bad. Such a view can be traced back to the Manichaean and
Judaic religions and to the prophet Zoroaster. In truth, reality does
not work that
way. Will humanity ever learn?